Worst: WWF’s Brief Infatuation With Pretending A Guy Is A Race He Isn’t

My opinion on Razor Ramon is not the greatest. It’s hard to have constructive opinions about these guys now because so many of them are important to the childhoods of wrestling fans today, sorta like how you could say “Great Muta mailed it in more often than not” and I’d scream I’LL KILL YOU and leap across the table and try to choke you to death.

But yeah, Scott Hall doing Al Pacino doing Scarface is not great. It might not be so bad if we hadn’t had Yokozuna on the same show, but WWF’s mid-90s thing of handing out racial identities like they were trunks colors is the worst. Hall eventually made the character self-aware enough that when he showed up in WCW going HEY YO we were in on the joke, but man, watching him dress like an 80-year old retired Floridian woman and say “mang” to a crowd of white children is depressing. I BEAD UP JOO BRUDDER, MANG. You were the Diamond Studd like two years ago, asshole, your tanner is the safest blackface ever.

Best: A Random Best For Anything Owen Hart Related, Ever

Owen only shows up for a second or two on this Raw, being beaten up backstage by Razor Ramon to help build Razor’s feud with Bret Hart. Because I write about Owen Hart even less than I write about Battle Bowl, I will give “Owen Hart getting kicked in the ribs while wearing his High Energy-esque Zubaz jumpsuit” a Best.

Everything Owen Hart ever did was a Best. Even the “leg out of your leg” thing. Everything.

Best: The Sherri Martel Version Of ‘Sexy Boy’

Zero Hour Shawn Michaels shows up on the first episode of Raw fresh enough into his Heartbreak Kid run to be an undercard guy, but late enough to have the full Sherri Martel screeching version of ‘Sexy Boy’. While they don’t appear on the show, the first episode of Raw is secretly full of the most bulletproof people in the history of WWE, people like Owen Hart and Sherri Martel.

Seriously, if you haven’t heard this (or haven’t heard it in a while), get ready for Shawn Michaels’ return on Raw 1000 with the best theme ever:

According to legend, Konnan (let me speak on this) was supposed to be Max Moon, but he left WWF after a “backstage disagreement”, possibly centering around how f**king ridiculously awful the Max Moon suit looked. Paul Diamond of the Orient Express fit the suit, so he got stuck being “Maximilian Moon, Man Of The Future”.

From Wikipedia:

The suit was a very elaborate powder blue bodysuit with markings that were supposed to look like a circuit board and white protruding rings around his arms making him look rather “outlandish”. The elaborate outfit also came with two wrist devices that shot out fireworks and a jet pack that was supposed to make Max Moon look like a man of the future.

I want to do a gritty reboot of Max Moon and have him be a guy who can’t stop pulling down his pants.

Worst: That Awful Shawn Michaels Suplex Finisher

One of the worst things about playing WWF video games from this era is trying to set up and superkick people with Shawn Michaels, only to find out he’s got a SUPLEX as his finisher. Enter the Teardrop Suplex, where Shawn reaches between your legs, clasps his hands around your nuts and kinda Olympic Slams you over. It looks like it has less impact than a bodyslam, but it kills you. The crowd reacts to it with less enthusiasm than an actual bodyslam, and Shawn gets the win anyway.

The Teardrop Suplex is a great example of how lucky you can be in the world of wrestling, and how important getting and getting over certain moves can be. Can you imagine Shawn Michaels without Sweet Chin Music? He just looks like a Rocker still, right? What’s even worse is when he first started using it but before he added in the “tuning up the band” stomps, and he’d stand in the corner waiting for a guy to get up all awkwardly, like he knows he’s SUPPOSED to be doing something but doesn’t know what. It’s like now, when Zack Ryder hops back and forth making L-I hands and looking for the camera light so he knows when to do the move.

I’m trying to picture how differently WrestleMania 14’s title match finish would’ve played out if Austin had had to do “LET GO OF MY NUTS, NO” gestures before Stunner attempts.

I used to listen to Jim Ross’s radio show when he was at WCW, and hear the disgust in his voice when he talked about characters like Arachnaman, and how WWF was a circus. And then he went there, and had to scream BY GOD through the shame for 20 years.

Awesome. Just awesome. I think any time Raw stinks (which may be often, given the 3-hour expansion), I think you should just replace it with a B&W of an older RAW.

Also, too: Did you happen to see this interview with Dolph Ziggler? The interviewer asks him who his favorite wrestler to work with is – I think you’ll find the answer interesting. Or your head may explode. One or the other.

I didn’t realize that Razor Ramon wasn’t really Cuban, or actually named Scott Hall. Because I was just a kid, and who cares?

More to my point, I’ve meant plenty of people that, if I didn’t know they were being 100% sincere, I would tell them that they were setting a bad example for the race or creed that they represent. I just accepted Ramon for who he wasn’t.

This is highly illuminating. I didn’t watch wrestling as a kid, possibly because I was a girl, or even more possibly because my parents noticed how riled up we’d get after an episode of “American Gladiators” and didn’t want to trust their luck with even more advanced methods of fake combat. My only wrestling memories are therefore slim jims commercials, stretch armstrong, those weird stripey pants being everywhere, and that one time in 7th grade when a kid in my class reported that he had seen a wrestler plummet to their death in Kemper Arena (RIP Owen Heart).

So, really, as a newcomer to this weird fandom I appreciate the blast from the past, and does anybody know where I can get a moonsuit?

My favorite is him doing a lady voice and telling the Undertaker to take the hair out of his eyes because he’s got such a pretty face, completely undermining the entire point of the fucking Undertaker.

Brilliance, sir. I actually stopped watching wrestling around this time too as my childlike brain understood the idea of marketing disappointment and not wanted to watch a clown wrestle for any reason whatsoever.
I want to use the phrase “challenging a f**king space alien to a Kumite” for everything.

Everyone in the WWF from this time had a second job or was a racist stereotype. Duke “The Dumpster” Droece is a Garbage Man by day, but he jobs to Ultra Wasp Hunter Hearst Helmsley by night. It was awful but I was 12 so it’s okay.

I like to think that kayfabe IRS was never an actual government employee but just a collections enthusiast. He’d totally pull a Fred Willard in front of a crying family as their home was getting foreclosed upon.

Regarding Vince as announcer – I’ve been going through the big 4 PPVs, starting with WM 1 and any time Vince takes over, usually for Monsoon, it’s pretty damn horrible. Of course, I’d say Lord Alfred Hayes is worse, but Vince is bad.

Brandon, I was reading this while I was in a meeting, and I had to leave because I was shaking with laughter over the Vince stuff I’m the beginning. It was one of my favorite things you’ve ever written. Now I’m hiding in the bathroom, trying to finish reading it.

This was a very fun write up, Brandon, and I really liked the history and perspective you brought to how the WWE changed the way we looked at wrestling. Wrestling fans talk about history a lot but very rarely do we actually acknowledge the trends and stylistic differences the way you touched on here.

The worst kind of funny guy in our world, worse than the Twitter parody or the guy who makes memes out of everything, is the radio shock jock. A certain kind of guy gets into his mid-30s with just enough hair and just enough weight and just as many pairs of sunglasses as necessary to think that insulting people and making fart noises on their figurative graves is funny. Others, who grew up similarly but did not keep enough hair or gain enough weight or buy enough sunglasses, latch onto these comedians because easy, shitty jokes are comforting and growing up means you’re “politically correct”.

This was a fantastic write up, maybe the one I have enjoyed the most. I just still hate the “pre crisis” labeling haha. Must just be me.

I was a WWF who didn’t start watching WCW until Hogan went over outside of some stray WCW Saturday Nights. A lil after Hogan’s arrival, I got a copy of Spring Stampede 1994 and it changed me. Was an awesome card with great wrestling, and seeing Flair/Steamboat for the first time was amazing. Bret Hart was always my favorite, so seeing guys who could go and were kinda like him in WCW was great.

Man, this brings back a lot of painful memories. Unlike Brandon, this is right around the time I FIRST quit watching wrestling. I grew up in the 80’s watching WWE and this is around the time when all of my favorites started leaving and getting replaced with IRS, The Mountie, Doink, Repo Man, etc. Yeah, I was a Hulkamaniac when I was under the age of 10, but I also loved watching Macho Man, the Rockers, the Hart Foundation, Legion of Doom, Million Dollar Man, and most other guys they had. Around the mid 90’s the cartoon characters got to be too much and I barely watched it (I grew up rooting against WCW like they were a rival sports team…I was a kid, shut up). I didn’t start to get back into it until around 1998 when my brother told me about Stone Cold.

Btw, the announce team of Vince, Savage, and Imus guy is the bizarro of Gorilla and Heenan.

Memmmmmmoooorrrriiiiieeeessss…. this was a great trip down memory lane/hell for someone who did grow up on WWF (and actually watched this ep). Youngertaker is my new favorite things. And the fact that you gave HBK a Best is something I will remember forever ;). Barlett was the absolute worst. During the first 10 minutes of RAW we get like, two, racial stereotype jokes pertaining to Yoko… stay classy Bartlett.

“WAHH TWOOO THREE YES HE GOT HIM MR. PERFECT WON THE MATCH IN 20 SECONDS HE BEAT RIC FLAIR HE PINNED HIM I SAW IT and then get up and gather his belongings and take off his headset and wander off, and f**king four hours later he’d be at home having dinner and his eyes would bulge out and he’d stand up and suddenly scream NO HE DIDN’T~! The worst. Just the worst.”

Thanks for this Brandon. I laughed all the way through this writeup because I watched this show on Sunday and had the exact same reaction to the Narcissus thing, to the point where I wondered if that was going to be his original name. Then I went to YouTube on my own volition and watched the debut video, and crinkling up my face at the upskirt shots of Luger’s quads.

Also, everyone should watch the Steiners match if only for the botch where the Executioner trips over his own feet on an Irish whip and goes careening into the middle rope face-first. It was a thing of beauty.

You’re rant on Vince as terrible announcer reminded me of one of his calls that never ceases to crack me up.

It was HBK vs. Jeff Jarrett for the IC title, and Jarrett has Michaels in a pin attempt, and Vince tried to do his ONETWOTHREE…NO…HE KICKED OUT!!! call but messed it up and it came out “ONE…TWO…THREEOOOOWW”. It sounded like he just growled when Michaels kicked out. I’m laughing just thinking about it.

Mang this was awesome! I wasn’t into wrestling anymore by the ’90’s. I started watching in the ’80’s when I was a kid, but by the ’90’s I’d lost interest. I didn’t get back into till 2000. It’s cool reading about the this era right before the Attitude started. I know little to nothing about early 1990’s wrestling. Hope you do more Bhra!